Hannah Fairbrother

I am a Lecturer in Child and Family Health and Wellbeing at the University of Sheffield and an active member of the university's interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of Childhood and Youth. I completed my PhD in Public Health at the School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR), Sheffield in 2013 under the supervision of Professor Liddy Goyder and Professor Penny Curtis. I was appointed as a Lecturer in the School of Nursing and Midwifery in the same year.

My research focuses on the health and wellbeing of children, young people and families. I am particularly interested in socioeconomic inequalities in health - how they are experienced, generated and maintained and how policies can help to reduce inequalities. This stems from my upbringing in Sheffield, a city of contrasts in both health and wealth, visiting family in Anfield, Liverpool and through voluntary work in Cambridge with young mothers and with children in a disadvantaged area of Paris.

I have worked with the ScHARR Public Health Collaborating Centre to produce guidance for the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) regarding the efficacy of interventions to promote the social and emotional wellbeing of vulnerable children (aged 0-5).

My PhD explored how children make sense of food in their daily lives and how they understand the relationship between food and health. I worked with children and parents in socioeconomically contrasting neighbourhoods. The study highlighted the importance children attach to their families in terms of their health-related understandings and practices. It also demonstrated the myriad sources which children draw upon, engage with and critique in forming their health-related understandings, ideas and motivations and how these may differ between children from different socioeconomic backgrounds. I am interested in employing the concept of health literacy, explored very little with regards to children, to further our understanding of how children access, interact with and create meaning in relation to health messages.

Research areas
- The health and wellbeing of children, young people and families
- Socioeconomic inequalities in health
- Health literacy

Experience

2013–present

Lecturer in Child and Family Health and Wellbeing, University of Sheffield